9 EVENINGS: Breathing and Staring

Darren Joyce, George Saxon & Justin Wiggan

Drawing on their groundbreaking projects with the health sector, the artists presented new research exploring empathy, nostalgia and recall through audio, performance and film. Their individual contributions were intended to clash, coexist and repel each other.

Justin Wiggan explored the portrayal of nostalgia, drawing from the empathy tests used to tell humans from androids in Philip K Dick’s cult novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the cultural phenomenon of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) – the pleasurable tingling sensation in the head, scalp, back, or peripheral regions of the body in response to visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or cognitive stimuli; and Harsh Noise Wall – in which artists produce unchanging, monolithic “walls” of static noise.

George Saxon presented BREATHING TEST: Dying Melody, a new work focused on breathing (inhalations and exhalations), and the limitations caused by childhood respiratory illness and auto-immune weakness. Through live performance, archived video recordings, visual and audio soundscapes, Saxon explored illness and its manifestations, highlighting the liminal gap between memory, recall and nostalgia. Watch here.

D Joyce, used binaural recordings (holographic 3D sound), to explore schizoaffective disorder – a brain disorder in which sufferers experience two vastly different worlds within one consciousness. Schizoaffective disorder is to experience both the world that non-sufferers perceive, but also a complex world riddled with auditory hallucinations and mood swings. Joyce invited the audience to listen to holographic sound in realtime through the medium of headphones and experience what it’s like to live in an audible parallel reality.

Programme of events:

Friday 02 October | 6-8pm
Joyce, Saxon and Wiggan presented a live event for Digbeth First Friday

Saturday 03 October | 3-4pm
The artists discussed their collaboration and wider practices.

This event was presented as part of 9 Evenings: Redux, a season of new collaborative commissions in which artists will critique, re-work and react to the seminal 1966 series 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering.